Road to Valour by Aili McConnon

Author:Aili McConnon [McConnon, Aili]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-66949-8
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2012-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

If bicycles shaped the rhythm of everyday life in postwar Italy, it was poverty and endemic joblessness that defined its spirit. Economic coverage in the newspapers of the era was as optimistic as a retelling of the story about the plagues of Egypt. Headlines and articles were filled with jarring statistics. Six hundred thousand agricultural day laborers went on strike in the fall of 1947 in the Po Valley. Shortages made Italian gasoline three times as expensive as it was in France, and almost four times as expensive as in the United States. The unemployment rate for industrial workers in central Italy (including Tuscany) rocketed past sixty percent.

The numbers told only part of the story. Gino and his teammates saw the face of poverty everywhere they raced. War had reduced entire city neighborhoods to rubble. Women tried to heat food over haphazard cooking fires set up in the streets. Grizzled, weary men stared somberly as they sipped coffee from old tin soup cans. In Ventimiglia, a small town in northern Italy, an American journalist was dumbfounded by the sight of a pizzeria destroyed during the war where “half-naked children crowded together on the dusty rim of the broken walls and in the holes that had been windows.”

Florence lay in shambles. Along the Arno River, where Gino had swum as a child, sat piles of rubble, the remains of the many bridges bombed by the retreating Germans. Nearby buildings and medieval towers stood in various states of collapse and disrepair. The Jewish synagogue had also been disfigured; it was damaged while being used to store German trucks, and another part of the building was dynamited.

In the face of such wreckage nationwide and with few opportunities for employment, some 750,000 Italians went to work temporarily in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. (Tens of thousands of other Italians would leave Italy permanently.) The work that awaited them in those countries was inevitably the most grueling—mining for coal, working in the fields or forests—and the wages tended to be low. Living in pitiable conditions and unable to speak the native languages of the countries in which they worked, many Italian workers quickly found themselves scorned by the locals—even if they had been officially invited and contracted to work by the same locals’ governments.

Collectively, these enduring miseries, the everyday hardships and indignities suffered at home and abroad, made an already strained political situation downright volatile. Complex, emotionally charged questions shadowed every aspect of public life. What to do with the monarchy? How to craft a new constitution? What to do about individuals who had been involved in the previous Fascist government? What course would Italy take in the postwar era?

And—perhaps most important of all—who would lead it?

Two men emerged as viable candidates for the task. The first was Alcide De Gasperi, a severe sixty-seven-year-old former librarian whom one journalist described as “utterly honest and sincere, painfully humorless and uninspiring.” He was the leader of the Christian Democrats, a large centrist party that was allied closely with the Roman Catholic Church.

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